Religious Grieving

My sister lent me her copy of Modern Loss by Rebecca Sofer and Gabrielle Birkner. The book is a compilation of personal stories about death, as well as cartoons, and opens each section with continuations of Sofer's or Birkner's narrative. 

What struck me was that although Sofer and Birkner are Jewish, and maintained (to some extent) the Jewish rituals like shiva, there was no mention of religion as a source of comfort.  

Simultaneously, I was reading a novel by Elinor Lipman called The Inn on Lake Devine, in which there is a tragic death. There was this scene that stood out to me: 

I asked him if he believed in life everlasting and all that. 

"Do you?" 

I lied. "Sure." 

He said, "I wish I did." 

I told him I didn't either but had wanted to say the right thing. I said, "I think religion was invented to deal with death. It's when it helps the most."  

The narrator, by the way, is Jewish. 

I am not a heretic; I don't believe religion was invented to deal with death. But religion most certainly helps. 

Many other vignettes in the book mention shiva, or other Jewish death rituals, but there is no conversation about how that connects to a greater plan. 

After Ma died, my niece was asking worriedly what Babi had died of. My sister explained, but then clarified, quoting the family guru: "But Babi didn't die because she was sick. She died because it was her time." 

Viewing the vacuum Ma left behind, at times I feel despair at the impossibility of ever adequately filling it and wonder, "Why did she have to die?" But for the most part, I'm at peace with it. 

My grandparents dealt with such losses that boggle the mind—nor were they all Holocaust inflicted (Babi never knew her father; he died when she was a baby. Her mother died on the table after a misdiagnosis before the war). Perhaps, that is why I mostly experience gratitude—amongst the sadness—for the years I did have with my mother.

There is comfort when one abdicates control.